Labels

Sample Text

Definition List

Pages

Ordered List

Wednesday, March 30, 2016

PRAFUL BIDWAI COLUMN Time for a new start

Praful
Bidwai

Sri Lankans have made democracy's
cause proud by ending President Mahinda Rajapaksa's 10-year-long authoritarian
rule and electing former health minister Maithripala Sirisena. All South Asians
should celebrate this defeat of majoritarianism and militarist nationalism and
struggle to make our countries inclusive, pluralist democracies which
accommodate diversity in religion, culture and ethnicity.

Foreign Minister Mangala Samarweera
has alleged that Rajapaksa tried to stage a coup to prevent the election
result's announcement. These charges testify to the climate of confrontation
and suspicion that Rajapaksa created. They must be impartially investigated.

Sirisena faces tough challenges. The
first is to cohere the different parts of the rainbow coalition that catapulted
this low-key politician to power, including the Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist
Jathika Hela Urumaya, the two main Muslim parties, and arch-rivals: former
president Chandrika Kumaratunga and former prime minister Ranil Wickramasinghe.

This won't be easy. Nor will it be
easy to convince the Northern or Jaffna Tamils that they can expect a better
deal under Sirisena than under Rajapaksa.

Over 80% of Northern Tamils voted
for Sirisena. In a brilliant tactic, Tamil National Alliance leader R.
Sampanthan delayed announcing support until a week before polling, denying
Rajapaksa an opportunity to polarise the contest along ethnic-chauvinist lines.

Implementing the promised political
reform -- replacing the executive presidency with a parliamentary system within
100 days -- would require the support of 150 members of the 225-strong
Parliament. This cannot be done without neutralising the Rajapaksa brothers,
whose Sri Lanka Freedom Party holds 135 seats.

Rajapaksa has surrendered the SLFP's
chairmanship, but wants that all inquiries related to his family's corruption
and undemocratic conduct be dropped. This cynical manoeuvre must be, and can
be, scuttled.

Sirisena will have to negotiate hard
with JHU and other Sinhala supporters. In the North, he must send the army back
to the barracks. Many soldiers have grabbed lands belonging to displaced
Tamils. Evacuating them is a precondition for defending the livelihoods of this
persecuted minority.

Another challenge is arresting the
drift towards neoliberalism and foreign-capital dependence for growth. During
the civil war, foreign aid and Western investment dried up. Rajapaksa opened
new avenues for financial flows, primarily from China, into real estate,
casinos, and for-profit universities and hospitals.

This has aggravated unemployment in the
Sinhala South. The North and East are plagued by a collapse of agriculture, a
fall in rural incomes, and widespread indebtedness. This comes on top of
the dispossession which Tamils suffered during the war. An estimated 40,000
civilians were killed during the last phase of the massive operation against
the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, many of them in planned
war-crimes.

The Rajapaksa government always
described the war as an “anti-terrorist” operation and inflicted cruelties on
civilians branded “LTTE supporters.” This is impermissible under the laws of
war. Colombo has defied attempts by UN agencies to hold its functionaries
accountable for war-crimes.

India failed to restrain Colombo,
and supported its “sovereign” right to “defend” itself. The “all-out” war
against Tamil separatism became a Right-wing, militarist-Hindutva model for
what India should do in Kashmir, and how it should deal with recalcitrant
minorities.

The model's proponents argue that
human-rights violations and war-crimes are permissible if they deliver
“results”: the short-term price is worth paying to achieve a stronger, more
united nation in the long run.

Sirisena unfortunately inherits his
predecessor's “anti-terrorist” war premise. His manifesto said: “No
international power will be allowed to… touch a single [Sri Lankan] citizen …
on account of the campaign to defeat terrorism.” This is retrograde
national-chauvinism.

South Asian governments must mount
pressure on Sirisena to fix responsibility for war-crimes, if necessary through
a domestic truth commission.

Such efforts are most likely to
succeed if there's devolution of powers to the North and East as part of a
grand inter-ethnic reconciliation. Sirisena shouldn't reject devolution
proposals just because they weren't part of the terms on which the Tamils
supported him.

Their support was unconditional. But
it reflected the character of the election, a referendum on corruption,
cronyism and family-based rule, represented venally by Rajapaksa.

Sirisena helped set up the
referendum, at the right moment. He won because the people didn't want to
degrade Sri Lankan democracy further.

We South Asians too can get rid of
leaders who today seem invincible, as Rajapaksa did. We should at least try --
through mass mobilisation, where necessary.

Many analysts have focused,
obsessively, on the election's security implications, which offer India a
chance to displace China as a major source of finance and armaments to Sri
Lanka. Chinese policy is of course opportunist. Rajapaksa exploited it as a
shield against Western human-rights pressure.

But the Indian state is no paragon
of virtue. It regards its whole neighbourhood as its exclusive sphere of
influence. India first armed and trained the LTTE, and then turned against it.
India's military intervention in Sri Lanka (1987-90) was a disaster.